Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act

As noted in McConnell v. FEC, a United States Supreme Court ruling on BCRA, the Act was designed to address two issues:


Although the legislation is known as "McCain–Feingold", the Senate version is not the bill that became law. Instead, the companion legislation, H.R. 2356—introduced by Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT), is the version that became law. Shays–Meehan was originally introduced as H.R. 380.^[3]

History of the bill[edit]

In the aftermath of Watergate, Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, which put new limits on contributions to campaigns.^[4] Four years later, the FEC ruled that donors could donate unlimited money to political parties (but not the candidates themselves) if the party used that money for "party building activities" such as voter registration drives, but not to directly support candidates.^[4] Both the Republican and Democratic parties nonetheless used this money to support their candidates, and money donated to parties became known as soft money.^[4] In 1992, President George H. W. Bush vetoed a bill passed by the Democratic Congress that would have, among other things, restricted the use of soft money.^[5] President Clinton pushed for a similar bill, but was unable to get both houses to agree on one bill.^[4]


In 1995, senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) jointly published an op-ed calling for campaign finance reform, and began working on their own bill.^[4][6] In 1998, the Senate voted on the bill, but the bill failed to meet the 60 vote threshold to defeat a filibuster. All 45 Senate Democrats and 6 Senate Republicans voted to invoke cloture, but the remaining 49 Republicans voted against invoking cloture. This effectively killed the bill for the remainder of the 105th Congress.^[7]


McCain's 2000 campaign for president and a series of scandals (including the Enron scandal) brought the issue of campaign finance to the fore of public consciousness in 2001.^[4] McCain and Feingold pushed the bill in the Senate, while Chris Shays (R-CT) and Marty Meehan (D-MA) led the effort to pass the bill in the House.^[4] In just the second successful use of the discharge petition since the 1980s, a mixture of Democrats and Republicans defied Speaker Dennis Hastert and passed a campaign finance reform bill.^[8] The House approved the bill with a 240–189 vote, sending the bill to the Senate.^[9] The bill passed the Senate in a 60–40 vote, the bare minimum required to overcome the filibuster.^[6] Throughout the congressional battle on the bill, President Bush declined to take a strong position,^[9] but nonethless signed the bill into law in March 2002 after it cleared both houses of Congress.